A Lament and a Prayer

by the Rev. Danette Kong, with a prayer from Rev. Dr. Robert W. Nelson

While trying to put together a post for the website about Hope and Courage and Being Light, I pondered that I can only experience these ideals for myself in bits and pieces at a time. How do we live IN Hope? How do we live IN Courage? I type words and post pictures for the website, and they feel to me right now to be so lofty and idealistic. Yet, this past week as we watched the intrusion of hate-filled, wannabe warriors upon our nation’s Capitol, I felt a quivering in my chest as I realized we were facing something truly evil happening in the seat of our government. I’m quite aware that, on many occasions I have been posting meditations and quotes to help ME cope, to tell ME not to be discouraged, to tell ME to have courage and hope, more than anyone else.

It’s not exactly that I am WITHOUT Hope. But uncertainty lingers around longer, like an unwanted trespasser. I have had a dark, foreboding sense of these times we are facing since November and December, 2019. So, I am not surprised, but the magnitude of what is imminent is heavy — and heavier over this past week than it has ever been.

Probably the most fearful I have been for my life was while marching in Cumming, Georgia a week after Martin Luther King Day back in January, 1987 – and here we are, just a couple weeks shy of that day, 34 years ago. The little girl whose hand I held throughout those miles of marching turns 39 this year, and I still feel that sweet little palm in mine. Perhaps it was a sense of needing to be protective and strong for her that kept me going, while her dad carried a huge American flag on a large pole. I recall seeing blood running down the faces of other marchers who had bricks thrown at them, the jeering and spitting from Ku Klux Klan members dressed in their hoods (and, by the way, what kind of detergent do they use to keep those robes so white?). All these decades later, I still see those people in my mind’s eye – they are filled with fury, carrying their young children who quite possibly are part of the insurgency today. While rushing back to our own car, my eyes glanced quickly at officers of the law, their clubs batting and swinging, chasing down racists who had been attacking other marchers, handcuffing those predators on the ground. Pandemonium.

And those of us who marched were privileged to have been protected by the National Guard. I marvel at how blacks (and some white clergy) marched over Pettus Bridge in Selma back in the 1960s, knowing full well what kind of physical price they would probably pay. And there were NO National Guardsmen there for them that day.

It takes a lot of “crazy” for people to riot together, as well as to march peacefully together. When you are rioting and destroying together, I imagine there’s some sort of adrenaline rush of brotherhood and testosterone, like being on some sort of hunt in the wild, or saving the world from alien invaders. But when you are trying to march peacefully, you realize some people don’t care if they injure you, your eyes are tempted to dart in all directions, and you are hypervigilant. That’s a whole other type of “crazy.” I think of MLK, Jr., and John Lewis, because they were able to make peace with injury/death, and kept their eyes focused on “the prize.” I wonder how those poor guards and police felt being overpowered in the Capitol building last week; how the leaders of our government felt being evacuated.

Throughout my life, I have sat at my piano, or held my guitar as I tried to make sense of questions and struggles in my life — or as I simply tried to find an outlet for emotions I could not reasonably identify, let alone, fathom. The day after the Capitol invasion, I tried to sit at my piano and write music that is hopeful, but I couldn’t. I found myself writing words that were defiant, but my hands and my heart didn’t want to cooperate on the keyboard. I suppose I could try to write music to dance to someday, but its time hasn’t arrived.

Sometimes I just hold a candle and feel the warmth it lends to my hand, and just try to center in that. Sometimes I find I am holding my breath, like I’m waiting…waiting…for the unknown, before I allow myself to really breathe normally again. Will that ever be possible? And sometimes, especially when I wake up in the morning and my bed is warm while the chill touches my face, I just want to stay under the covers and not face the reality of these days.

I shared these feelings with the rest of our Shine Your Light team, discouraged somewhat by its melancholy. The Rev. Dr. Robert W. Nelson responded with a prayer inspired by words from the New Zealand Prayer Book, and we offer it here:

“God of this uncertain world,
Reveal yourself to us, who are so uncertain at this time
and in distress. Help us to come to terms with the reality
of divisiveness, seditiousness and racism, and still to hope,
still to search out what there remains to do.
God be our comfort and support;
God be our hope and strength;
God be our Light and our way;
Creator, Redeemer and Giver of Life, remain with us now
and forever. Amen.”